


sunspots

by ennaih (aquandrian)



Category: Original Work
Genre: Abortion, Angst with a Happy Ending, Aussie snark, Discussion of Pregnancy, F/M, Nightclub, Semi-Public Sex, Smut and Angst, accidental feelings, another Mendo AU, everything is totally consensual don't worry, fuckups trying to be adults, mention of drug use, no actual drug use, occasionally rough sex, smoking and swearing cos Mendo, this is as close to xReader as i get
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-26
Updated: 2018-01-26
Packaged: 2019-03-09 15:00:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 20,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13483935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aquandrian/pseuds/ennaih
Summary: Sexual attraction and mind games in nightclub life. Nothing good ever comes out of a relationship started like this.





	1. fuck in the fire

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the song by Nine Inch Nails.
> 
> Specifically inspired by these two pix because they burrowed into my goddamned brain:
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> Thanks so much to vell1chor who, aside from providing endless enthusiasm and appreciation to a needy writer, read the first half of this and told me, because I couldn't make up my mind, to keep going because there was so much possibility.

He is the personification of every bad late night decision. 

Messy hair, face gleaming with sweat, cigarette dangling precariously from his lower lip, brash and bleary-eyed. He yells philosophy over the thumping music at his friends, laughs very loud at stupid jokes. There is always a glass of whisky in one hand, the other arm is usually slung around the shoulders of some woman feverish with his attention. She sees him in the smoke and murk of the underground nightclubs of Kings Cross, his suits creased and disreputable, the tie often pulled askew and loose. He licks men’s faces, staggers out with booby women, gets into fights on the sidewalks. One day he’s going to be passed out in the gutter, and no one will be surprised.

For a while, they move in vaguely overlapping circles of Sydney nightlife. All the trashy glamourous people of the arts and literati scene, varying degrees of talent and intellect. Really it seems to her to be the same grind of clubs and parties and gigs, of being a social animal operating on glitter and alcohol and acidic conversation, constantly moving, constantly stimulated. Of trawling and being trawled, because everyone’s hoping to find someone worthy in this mess of people thronging the old tarnished city by the sea.

Part of her is convinced there is absolutely no chance of anything meaningful starting in places like this, amid the smoke and sticky floors and brick walls strobed with changing colours. And what an artificial notion that is -- that clubs and parties are only good for hookups and self-destruction, that healthy relationships only start in good wholesome places like bookstores and coffee shops and weddings and work dos. All these scenarios absorbed from romcoms and novels and lifestyle blogs, all these notions pushing and pulling and clashing in her head as she goes through the crowds, looking for her friends. 

He moves on the periphery of her awareness, noticed every now and then when his conversation cuts across hers, when their groups cross and mingle. She immediately recognises the kind of man he is. Or at least the man he is right now at this stage in his no doubt turbulent life. He’s wild and scarily intelligent and unhesitant to be cruel to his friends or random strangers who annoy him with their feeble minds. She catches snippets of his conversations, overhears his loud abrasive opinions about this film or that, this novelist or that, why the current production of Death Of A Salesman is a fucking farce and a betrayal of the source material.

She wonders aloud then if Arthur Miller being a fuckwit to Marilyn Monroe warrants such a farcical reverence. Dark blue eyes narrow on her, and he says cuttingly that there is such a thing as separating the artist from the art. To which she snorts, “Right, because only a New Critic arsehole terrified of his own emotions would be stupid enough to believe that.”

His brows shoot up. “As opposed to reducing every work of art to the artist’s life because there is no act of imagination, no power of imagination?”

“Of course not,” she retorts, indignant. “It’s not reductive at all, it’s the act of transforming personal to art. All art is manifest of the artist’s longings and fears, whether they’re conscious of it or not, no matter how much they fucken posture about it. A creative person only creates because they’re lacking that thing, that experience in their life, to manifest it because they’re either too scared or too sensible to go after it in real life. Art is only effective -- affective, even -- when it’s authentic, it wouldn’t succeed if it wasn’t rooted in authentic emotion. So you’re not going to sit there and tell me that Arthur Miller’s plays don’t manifest and deal with his neurotic crises of masculinity, his failures as a man. Which poor Marilyn had to suffer the cruelty of in real life.”

“Okay, but that doesn’t mean we throw out an entire canon of --” 

But their friends divert the conversation to lighter funnier topics, shoving drinks in their hands. Her skin warm all over, she allows herself to be pulled onto the dancefloor. That argument was entirely an ego thing, she knows herself well enough, is honest enough to admit that privately to herself. Notice me, fuckboy, and let me dazzle you with my brilliant mind, I’m not like the other girls, don’t you see?

Because the women who accompany him are an everchanging procession, from alarmingly young to older than him and all besotted. They tend to be white with dark hair and blue eyes and good cheekbones, female mirrors of him. She is not necessarily all of these things, and depending on her mood of the night, this either amuses or deeply irritates her.

With her friends, she does shots and downs cocktails, making sure to never leave her drink unattended because she’s not stupid, and the whisper network always warns of the predators in the Sydney arts scene. She gets ever closer to doing coke and the hard stuff, taking longer each time to say no, no thanks, not this time, thanks mate.

As the seasons change and things change but stay the same in the smoky thumping clubs, she hooks up with a shaggy-haired guitarist who tastes of cigarettes and cheap whisky. He gives her discs of his band’s music, asks her to come to their gigs, and smiles at her from the stage. Turns out he doesn’t read fiction, relies a little too much on pot for his songwriting, and calls Eighties movies “old.” She ages about a decade when she hears this.

So she moves onto snogging a cute girl with dark smooth hair and very red lipstick and pretty vintage dresses. They hold hands in coffee shops and bookstores, make each other playlists of Goldfrapp and Kate Bush and Jeff Buckley. Turns out cute vintage girl prefers them younger.

Her heart a little more bruised, she returns to the round of clubs and gigs and parties. A new haircut, a slight shift of fashion, a subtle change in expression of self, all towards a certain sense of momentum. Their arguments continue, sometimes lighthearted, sometimes barbed. The friends seem to get used to this, joke around them. And she realises after a while that there’s a certain glinting smile in his eyes when he says something provocative at her. It’s delightful and maddening at the same time. She doesn’t want to respond to that smile, to let him see that his charm does work on her. It’s power she’s not willing to give him. But he says such things that she fires back on pure instinct, sparked before she can stop herself. And it is so much damned fun to argue with him, a joy that engages her from intellectual to sexual.

They’re moving closer to it. A circling tension of sharp smiles hiding blades, insults of acidic sweetness on the dancefloor and in the booths of torn leather washed with neon colours. In the warm flicker of underground light, the weathered skin of his face gleams. This dissolute lifestyle is telling on him, engraving lines around his mouth, finer creases around the sad pretty curve of his eyes. Smokes and alcohol and the occasional line of coke. He’s fighting, fleeing, fucking up something she doesn’t know, and doesn’t want to know.

She hears someone say the light has gone out of his eyes. It makes her wonder what he was like before, what he’s lost to be mourned. She overhears fragments of fierce conversations between him and male friends in club corners and corridors, these men telling him with frustration that he’s wasting his talent, fucking up instead of staying the course. It only makes him drink more and laugh louder. And she recognises that, the glorious death drive of sex drugs and dance.

Their arguments turn to a sort of hate flirting. He never touches her except for an accidental press of his thigh against hers in some cramped booth. But she notices he stops bringing girls to the clubs and parties, clearly in between relationships. And eventually when he stops her in a side corridor, music pounding around them, his smile sharp, she finds her back against the wall of peeling posters. 

“Fuck off,” she tells him, her voice unsteady with so much lust. “I’m not going to be your next little fucktoy.”

He quirks his brows, so horribly elegant and expressive. “No? Why not? Don’t think you’ll enjoy it?”

Her rage blazes up, straightens her spine so she looks him directly in the eye. “Oh, I have no doubt the sex will be mediocre at best. But --”

He puts one hand against the wall, effectively trapping her, his mouth curling with a sly sweetness as he looks at the shapes of her face.

“But,” she manages, aware of a treacherous warmth deep inside her, “I’m not that stupid. I am not some naive young girl you can charm with your wit and your big cock, and fool into thinking you’re a functional adult who might even take care of her. I know you’re incapable of it.”

Chase me, fuckboy, I’m not like all the other girls.

His expression hardens, the smile gone, and then his face relaxes into smooth and malevolent. “You know, it’s interesting. You’re so fucken eager to tell me exactly why you wouldn’t fuck me.” He smiles slow at her, his eyes very dark blue and beautiful. “I wonder what that means …”

“Oh? And you thinking calling me out is actually going to make me give in to you?”

Raw me, she wants to say, her fingers curling into the ripped paper. Just fucken raw me against the wall in the neon with the stink of spilt beer and cigarette smoke around us, where people could walk past and pretend not to see us.

He laughs softly and drops his arm, easing back. “Oh yes? So there’s no point me saying your tits look great in that dress? Rightie o.”

And he saunters off.

She’s so angry she doesn’t speak to him for the rest of the evening. 

The next week her group goes to a different club, watches a different band perform. It’s a whole new circle of people to move amid, new dynamics and energies to negotiate and stimulate. And she finds herself wondering every now and then if he’s moved on already, snogging some new young thing who’s going to get in way over her head because she can’t see how toxic he is right now, or god forbid she thinks she might be able to heal him.

There are guys who eye her and attempt a line in the new place, a few pretty girls who catch her attention. She drinks and watches, talks and dances. That tingle of pheromones in the smoky scented air as the music hurls against the scarred walls, and bodies move and push against each other. 

She’d much rather be at home, curled up with a show or a movie or a book.

With him.

The loneliness cuts with a breathtaking hurtfulness, never so visceral as when she’s surrounded by noise and talk and heat. And maybe it is a sort of relief to able to zero in on one person, to say, “I want you. No one but you, right now, in this moment.” 

This is why they’re out and not holed up at home, this is why they’re seeking, forever seeking.

___________

 

So the next weekend she walks down the stairs into the club of tattered finery and bare brick, into the blast of heat and music. Maroon dress with white polka dots that ties between her breasts, with maroon fishnet stockings and black ankle boots. She looks like a fucking lady, and feels the confidence to match. Her friends chatter around her, drinks procured, other friends found, the crowd scanned for potential interest. Her blood jitters through her veins, her mind changes every five minutes, engaging with the possibility and then shutting it right down.

On the dancefloor, the music throbs gorgeous melody, moves her into a joyful awareness of flesh and adulthood, of total female agency. As she lifts her hands into the air and swivels her hips to the beat, laughing with her responding friends, she makes herself a promise. 

If he’s here with some girl, that’s the end of it. 

If he’s alone, it’s on.

The song ends and another begins, energetic and predatory, fierce female sexual power pulsing through the colours and lights. Delighted, she twirls with the raw bassline, and sees him lounging against a booth. Another creased suit in shades of dark blue, tie crooked, glass of whisky in one hand, putting a smoke to his smirking lips as he watches her. 

She feels that same stab of mingled lust and fury. Does every heterosexual interaction reduce itself to this, the man consuming the woman?

No. No. Fucken change the narrative.

Don’t underestimate me, fuckboy, I’ll chew you up and spit you out. I’ll make you sorry you were born.

Their groups of friends converge. His smirk softens to a watchful hint of a smile as she approaches, acknowledging him with a slight lift to her chin. She doesn’t make it easy, she knows this, and it’s not always intentional. This is self-preservation and an iron sense of dignity after too many years making an arse of herself.

Random conversations, more alcohol, jokes and stories. She tunes in and out, dissociating a fair bit and then watching him across the smeared round table strewn with bottles and ashtrays and glasses. Food is ordered and comes in steaming warm dishes. Dumplings, wedges, wings and drumsticks, all the familiar nightclub fare. 

He stares back at her, all his brashness and cruelty put away because he’s sensed something has changed. His dark blue jacket is slung over the back of the booth, his pale blue shirt is crumpled, sleeves rolled up, and the tie pulled loose and low. There’s the slightest gleam of malice in the blue grey eyes catching light, and it burns her. How fucking smug he’s going to be when she makes her move, when he thinks he’s won this battle of ego and lust.

Well, at least that will cure her. The sex probably won’t be very good but at least she’ll get him out of her system, and there will be no more of this unbearable tension. They’ll fuck, it’ll be disappointing, and they’ll move onto other people with the occasional jibe about remember that one night, what a waste of time that was.

When she’s at the bar, getting another drink, she sees him in the reflection behind the bottles, making his way through the crowd to talk to some guy he recognises. She’s distracted into conversation with a woman she knows from a theatre company, but keeps an eye on his reflection, tracking him through the club. He heads towards the side corridor with the guy she now remembers offered her pills one time, and on instinct she excuses herself.

There will be no saving of him from his destructive tendencies. He’s an adult, he can do what he wants. She just wants to get him alone.

“Hey,” she says loudly through the thumping music. The other guy hurries off, and she sees him slip the twist of silver paper into his trouser pocket as he turns towards her, quizzical and louche.

“Hey --”

She grabs his jaw with one hand and kisses him. His back slams against the wall of peeling posters, his hands coming instinctively to her. Alcohol and sweet, she digs her nails into his face as they kiss, and then he’s grabbing her up against him, his mouth soft and fierce, responding with his own hunger. The intimacy of tasting him, the darkness of being in his arms, all the heat and hardness of him dizzies her. Instant addiction, he feels it too, she can tell from the way he kisses her, the way he grasps at her fishnet thighs, the skirt of her dress riding up a little. She steps in between his legs, wraps her arms around his neck, and feels a certain savage triumph when he gasps and kisses her deep and slowing. Slowing, slowing, his mouth thorough and exploring, warm and wet and open, slowing til they’re breathless, his hand sliding up the curve of her back, holding her in place against him.

They stop for a moment. She can feel his heart thundering, the same shakiness in his breath. Her lashes down, forehead against his, she looks at the wet weird curve of his mouth. This is new, and not in the way she had expected, the way maybe they had both expected. So she follows her instinct and pulls away, escaping into the loos. 

He doesn’t follow her.

The song soars over the bathroom speakers, pseudo angelic harmonies and saccharine lines of love that go so well with the black granite and smeared mirrors. In the cubicle, she remembers she had thought he’d rip her fishnets, that he’d swear at her as he tries to get at her cunt. She thought that when she was getting ready this evening. And now without knowing exactly why, she takes off her stockings, stuffs them into her purse.

Leaving the cubicle, she fluffs her hair out around her face, staring at her hard-eyed reflection. The song smooths out into relentless momentum, driving her heartbeat, driving her towards the next decision.

No one but you, right now, in this moment. 

And the agony that comes with that because making a move has hurled her into the unknown, hurled them both. Because she could be devastatingly wrong, risking heart and body and mind with this man she barely knows.

But that’s the thrill, isn’t it?

Actively seeking destruction just to see if she survives it. Because he’s not the only one fighting and fleeing and fucking.

Most of their group is on the dancefloor, flailing and hollering along to the music. He’s in the booth with the remaining lazier friends chatting amiably over their beers and the remnants of food. She gets a fresh drink and slides in next to him, aware that just being near him now is quickening her breath. Nonchalant, he pushes the mostly empty basket of wedges towards her. “Thanks,” she says, and they both turn their attention to their friends’ conversation.

She has one hand curled on her thigh, the thin skirt of her dress caught under her wrist. She can taste him still in her mouth. And as he fidgets, his elbow knocks hers. It makes her breath catch almost painfully in her chest, all her skin thrumming with awareness of his body so close to hers, tiny remembered flashes of how hot and hard he felt against her, how big his hand was on the contour of her back.

That same hand brushes hers now. When she glances at his profile, he’s concentrating on the conversation on the other side of the booth. His dark hair rumpled across his brow, the perfect bold line of his nose, and that finely cut mouth. She likes the curve of his chin, with that very subtle cleft. She breathes in, drops her gaze to the colourless glint of her drink, and slips her fingertips across the back of his hand under the table. 

He takes a swift inward breath, his shoulders tensing. And a delicious ease goes through her own body in response, the tiniest smile tugging at her lips. His hand slides over to grip the curve of her thigh, crushing the material of her dress. And her smile fades as she realises just how near his fingertips are to the wet seize of her cunt in smooth lace. Desire claws fierce in the pit of her stomach, pulses with the way his fingers flex on her thigh. It has to be so obvious where his hand is but their friends talk on, gesturing with their drinks.

He taps the ash off his cigarette, his expression perfectly indifferent. And under the table, she spreads her thighs a little, inviting him in. She props one elbow beside her drink, leaning her chin on her hand as she fakes interest and offers some remark to the discussion about Mad Max movies. Silent and intense, he keeps his eyes on their friends, takes a long slow drag on his smoke, and reaches between her thighs, dragging the back of his knuckles slow against the damp lace holding her cunt.

She gasps despite herself, her face going warm. His knuckles are so big, almost dipping inside her. She takes a swift gulp of her drink. Their friends escalate the discussion to an argument, and she keeps both hands flat on the table as below, he fingers her cunt getting ever wetter and softer until she’s pulsing, throbbing with pleasure. The lace is soaked through, rubs delicious friction between his thumb and her sensitised clit. Her breath rapid, nipples hard, she knows she’s going to moan any moment now, her thigh trembling under the weight of his bare forearm. And when she looks casually over at him, there’s a faint heat high on his cheekbones, breath ragged and his jaw very tight. So she slides her hand below the table, to touch him like he touches her, to feel how big he is in his suit trousers.

He bites his lower lip when she palms the bold shape of his cock, and pushes his thigh firm against hers. It’s ridiculously hot, they’re going to get caught out any moment. But he gets harder under her hand, and he tugs at the edge of her lace, slants a quick sidelong look at her. She can’t possibly, everyone’s going to see and know immediately. But she lifts off the seat for a quick few seconds, reaching for a napkin on the far side of the table, and he pulls the lace down enough so she sits back on bare warm leather. 

Their friends have now moved into discussing the future of the Australian film industry. It’s a topic of deep cynicism and rancour. And of course they both have to participate, although by now it’s reduced to grunts and snorts of laughter. 

He has two fingers teasing the soft intricate folds of her cunt, and she’s trying so hard to keep her hips still, to keep herself from fucking his hand. But then he teases her open and slides one blunt finger into her, so wet and tight she bites hard on her lower lip, strangling the moan in her throat. His eyes glitter as he looks down at the table, as his thumb rubs up against her clit. Her hand is gripping his hard cock through fine hot material, there’s lace stretched across her knees, trapping her in place, and she’s going to come so hard right there in the booth with all these people around them, and the music thrashing the smoke and strobing colours.

“Who’s up for shots?”

______________

 

It unnerves them both so much they barely speak to each other for the rest of the evening, focusing instead on their friends. At one point, she sees him touch his fingers to his mouth, thoughtful. And her breath catches with the realisation. The smell of her cunt is on his fingers. 

He grins at the punchline of a joke his friend tells, and very slowly, lashes lowering, he licks his thumb. 

She nearly faints.

They keep their distance from each other, and at the end of the night go home each alone. She moves distractedly through the week, in a daze every ten minutes with the memory of tasting his mouth, the way his bare forearm tensed on her thigh, the nicotine and whisky warmth of his blue shirt. The way he moaned into her mouth like he couldn’t help himself, like she undid him with desire. 

In her bed by lamplight, she touches herself as the music slides lush around her room, imagines him going under the table to spread her thighs and lick at her cunt, imagines him touching himself and thinking of her. She comes so hard and loud only the song drowns her out.

But when Friday night drinks roll up and their groups convene at some trendy as fuck bar in the Cross, a wariness closes around her. Shyness or self-preservation, it could be either. But she enters quiet after her friends, her energy tamped down to careful and watching for how things may or may not have changed. Maybe some old flame has come back into his life in the days intervening, maybe he’s realised he doesn’t want toxic hatefucking after all. Maybe that raw intensity unnerved him too much.

They spend half the night snogging in a hidden alcove of black brocade and leather padded wall occasionally strobed with neon colour. He cradles her nape with his big hand, and kisses her with a raw hungry honesty, moaning into her mouth as she holds his face and sucks on his tongue. The heat between them is exhilarating, completely intoxicating. He makes those helpless little sounds as they go down on the worn leather cushions, pushing against each other, dry fucking through jeans and tees, legs tangled and breathing hard.

He fondles her tits in the neon blue, whispering filth at her, that he knew she’d be like this, and contradicting himself the very next second, that she’s so much kinkier. She tells him to shut the fuck up and kisses him with a fierce joy. 

Damned right, fuckboy, you’ve never had it as good as me. 

He smells so delicious, of cigarettes and a clean sharp cologne, feels so right with his long strong body thrusting against hers, his hair rich and dark through her fingers as she twines her legs around his and rocks her softness against him. 

“God, fuck,” he snarls and pulls her tee up to catch under her arms. Her bra sparkles white silver in the ultraviolet light, and his hand gleams dark as he grasps her full breast and rubs his thumb over the lush curving flesh down towards the bead of her nipple. He wants to taste, she can tell, but he stops himself and kisses her throat instead, gently bites at her. It feels so weirdly illicit and new, this stolen intimacy in the shadows, this discovery of each other. She holds his chin with one hand and kisses him so deep he groans in his throat and curves his hand down between her thighs, cupping her through denim, stroking a little.

They spend the other half of the night in the company of their friends, bickering in top form. He goes right back to the art versus artist discussion which maddens her as much as it amuses her. Glittering eyes, wicked mouths and too loud laughter as the insults cut a little too close and the strong opinions threaten to overturn the simmering possibility. It could happen tonight, it probably almost definitely will happen tonight. She’s already tidied her apartment on the chance they go back to hers, feeling half a fool and also weirdly confident in this requited lust.

Except when they all go to leave at the end of the night, a friend gets into an altercation with some random equally drunk moron, and a fight breaks out on the footpath under the garish neon of Kings Cross. She watches him get involved, not throwing punches but helping to pull the two men apart. And of course the cops turn up and statements have to be taken, the injured friend accompanied to the police station. She sighs and goes to Maccas with her girlfriends, disappointed but unsurprised because it’s just another night in the Cross.

____________

 

She dawdles the next night on getting to the club, latently furious and sick of this delayed gratification. When she does saunter in very late, all sleek leather leggings and long singlet in gunmetal grey that shows off the swell of her tits, he leaves the group to come up to her at the bar.

“Took your time, didn’t you?” he says, a nasty edge to his tone. It thrills her but she gives him a fairly cool look over her shoulder.

“Did I? I wasn’t aware my whole life revolved around this fucken club.”

He’s very pale and pretty tonight in black jeans and his creased black shirt undone one button too low, sleeves rolled up. Dark rumpled curls and sharp blue grey eyes, he’s putting his smoke to his thin soft mouth as he watches her with that roiling malevolence. “So what’s your fucken problem?” 

Apparently it’s the direct approach tonight.

She takes her drink from the bartender, silver bracelets jangling around a black leather cuff, her automatic smile flicking off as she turns back to him. “What? Maybe I’m just bored of this.” She shrugs, moving past him.

“This is about last night -- he’s fine, by the way,” he snipes, following her. “Thanks for fucken asking.”

“Whatever,” she mutters as she takes a sip of her drink, heading away from their friends.

“What the fuck was I supposed to -- what did you expect me to do, just leave him?”

She turns to face him in the somewhat isolated corner of the club. “Look, I don’t have time for this juvenile bullshit. I don’t care what you do or what opportunities you waste --”

His brows go up, so very cynical, the cigarette dangling from his lower lip. “Right, so I’ve insulted your female vanity by choosing my mate over you --”

“Don’t flatter yourself, **_mate_** ,” she snarls. “If you want to spend the night in lockup, that’s your fucken business.”

“I should have spent it with you,” he says quietly.

She stares at him, disarmed. “Oh fuck you,” she whispers. He discards the cigarette in one smooth flick before pulling her to him, kissing her, savage and wet, as she fumbles her drink down on some ledge. 

His hands are bold and overfamiliar on her, grasping the curves of her hips in tight leather, pulling so her breasts squash full and firm against his chest. “You always have to make this fucken difficult,” he tells her thickly, dragging his hands up her sides, his mouth skewed and glistening.

“Shut up, fuckboy, you love it,” she replies and runs her fingers into his dark curls as she kisses him hard, wanting him to push her against the wall and grope her.

He grabs her face with his big hands, dark blue eyes glittering, and asks her breathlessly, “Do you want to get out of here or am I gunna have to fuck you against the fucken wall in front of everyone?”

She laughs. This was supposed to be hatefucking, exhilarating and self-destructive adult fun, pure physical rawness. And maybe it will be. 

“Big talk --” she starts to say and his eyes blaze determination, hands pushing her back. Laughing, she stops him. “I’d like that but no.” 

She looks at his mouth, lashes down, lips quirking. “Take me to yours.”

Turns out he lives somewhere on the back streets, a step away from the neon and the stripclubs and the Saturday night crowds of glittery fucked up young things and decrepit veterans of the Cross. Not very far but it seems to take twice as long because they keep stopping to snog under the strung up lights, stumbling on the cobblestones, all hands and hungry mouths. It’s so sleazy, a part of her is horrified that she lets this happen, but most of her loves it. 

He slants his mouth on hers, tilts his chin so he can kiss her deeper, his big hands easily spanning her waist. She moans, dizzied by the warmth of him, her fingers curling into the hot fabric of his black shirt. He’s hers for tonight, she’s going to have him. 

Except she’s not going to actually believe it until it’s over and done.

He lives in a warehouse building converted to lofts. The big iron door slams like a thunderclap after them, she turns on the darkened stairs, horrified at the racket, but he catches up to her, and his mouth swallows her words. He’s gotten desperate now they’re so close, his hands groping her arse, his mouth filthier and harder. She’s pushed against the side of the stairs, in the glimmer of the streetlight through the smeared window, and kisses him back with a glad sort of fury, raking her nails a little down his face. 

“Fuck,” he snarls into her mouth, and pushes his knee between her thighs. “Take this -- take this fucken off.” Maddened with lust, she helps him pull off her tanktop, and he groans when he closes his hands on her breasts. Blue push up bra, her perfume rises hot from her cleavage, and he buries his face there, so greedy that she’s a little overwhelmed and delighted.

“Where,” she manages, trying to pull out of his hold, half hoping he’s going to keep her there, half hoping that this is going to be fighting and fucking. “Let’s just --”

He traps her against the wall with his whole body, mouth ravenous on hers. She gets a fistful of curls at the back of his head, holding her to him, sucking on his tongue until he’s groaning and pulling at the cups of her bra. He gets his fingertips in and drags the material down, baring her tits all pushed up and firm, nipples erect in the stuffy stairwell air. “Yeah, jesus, like that,” he says fiercely and bites down on her breast. Shocked, she cries out, her cunt seizing wet in black leather, she’s arching into his mouth, fingers tightening in his hair.

They’re dry fucking again, this fervent animalistic rhythm of suck and thrust, mouth and flesh and hips through too much heated clothing. Her heart is pounding, his taste is in her mouth, she feels bruised by his fingers, gloriously marked and used. His cock rubs up against her throbbing cunt, they pull off his shirt, she gets to sink her teeth into the curve between his neck and shoulder, and he swears viciously at her, kisses her to stop her biting him. 

She pulls out of his hold, wanting to see if he follows, never mind their discarded clothes. There’s a door at the top of the stairwell, heavy industrial steel. She pulls it open and darts through, appallingly aware that her tits are out of her bra, sluttish and a little sweaty. As she puts her hands over her nipples, she sees the corridor ahead of her is long and panelled in dark wood, lit by a single yellow bulb, another flight of dark wooden stairs going up. She has just enough time to notice the single apartment door set at the far end before he grabs her around the waist and flings her around, shoving her against the side of the staircase. Glimpse of violent curls, red mouth and fierce blue eyes, and she pulls his mouth to hers, fighting and devouring, this lust ever raw and consuming.

His hands are at the leather leggings, peeling them down. It’s a horrible realisation that he wants to fuck her right here in the stairwell, that now he really is swearing as he tries to get at her cunt. But then she wants it too, a throaty fierce sound as she twists in his arms, bare legs spreading and one hand braced against the staircase, bracelets clattering. With the other, she pushes lace off her arse, and the sight of her bare cunt makes him swear, scrabbling at his jeans behind her. “Jesus, fuck, fuck,” he says, hooks one arm around her bare midriff, pulls her closer. And oh god his cock is too big, too hard.

She recoils with a cry, and he goes to his knees, shocks her with the melting heat of his mouth. She can’t care anymore how loud they are, how wanton she sounds at him eating her out with single-minded determination. He finds her clit, spreads the tiny folds of her hood apart and sucks on it, relentless and a little too skilful, on and on until she can’t take it any longer. “Oh fuck,” she gasps, clutching with one hand at his hair, “fuck me now. Now, christ.”

He’s still shockingly big but now she’s moaning and feeling her insides stretch around him, that delicious mindblowing sensation of slick soft flesh being entered hard and long and deeper, deeper. All her skin hot, she hunches her shoulders as he strokes her belly and coaxes her, his hips moving steady hard against hers, telling her how good she feels, how fucken good and hot and wet and oh fuck. He’s a talker, of course he’s a talker. 

When she flings up her head, starting to fuck herself on him, he straightens up and moves faster, gripping her hips as they quicken and quicken, her cunt getting so much wetter and starting to clench around him. “Oh god,” she hears herself say brokenly, and he grabs her breast with one hand, the other tipping her chin up. Her mouth catches his, his cock catches her sweet spot, and she rears up, taking control of her own pleasure, fucking him right there right there, skin aflame. 

“I am not,” she says suddenly, pushing at his hands, “I am not going to fucken come in a stairwell. No.”

“Oh, you are fucken kidding me!” he snarls, letting her go. 

She laughs back at him, nearly falling over in her giddiness, ankles shackled with lace and leather. 

He steadies her with a grin, saying hoarsely, “Well, come the fuck on, then.”

He lives in a warehouse loft of bare brick and big windows with mullioned glass panes. Books and records and a couple of pinball machines, everything in shadows and weird refractions of neon from outside. When he flicks on the toppling ricepaper lamp in the corner, she sees a freestanding copper bathtub by the farthest window, a few dying plants on the sill, coffee mugs and ashtrays of cigarette butts scattered everywhere. His bed is wide and completely lacking a headboard, all untidy dark blue sheets, standing in the middle of the loft, more books stacked by its side. The whole place smells of nicotine and trapped sunshine warmth, of his skin and cologne.

“Do you want a drink?” he asks, his voice ragged. He’s a beautiful lewd sight of a man, tousled hair, glittering blue eyes, sweaty red face and bitten mouth bleeding slightly, bare chested and hard cock out of his jeans.

She kicks off her heels and steps out of the rest of her clothes. “No,” she replies and pulls him to her. 

A grateful sound in his throat, he gets one arm around her waist and picks her up, shoving her against the brick wall so her bare legs wrap around him, his other hand firm on her naked breast. His cock pushes back into her, making them both moan with pure pleasure. “Jesus god, you feel so good,” he mutters, the muscles in his back moving under her hands as he fucks her with that hard steady rhythm. She whimpers in response, slowly losing her mind in the sheer bliss of it.

“Come here,” he says after a bit, hands cupping her arse. “On the bed.”

She has half a thought of all the women he’s fucked in these sheets but then he’s naked and on his back, looking up at her and saying with outrageous arrogance, “Get on my cock. I want to see your tits bounce.”

It makes her want to hit him, put his cigarettes out on his chest, snog his face off. And the violence clearly shows in her expression because he grins up at her. “No? Too far?”

“Oh fuck off,” she says crisply, and grabs his cock, bracelets jangling. He arches with a half bitten shout, and then groans long and heartfelt as she takes the hot hard length of him all the way into her slick cunt. “Fuuuuck,” he moans, stroking up her thighs and squeezing her arse as she starts to move on him, faster and faster, feeling the muscles in her back and hips work and work, watching him gasp and gasp at the feel of her, his feverish blue eyes seizing on the sight of her tits moving. Bloody good thing she chose the push up bra, she thinks with an inward grin, he would not get this good a view otherwise.

The sheets tangle and move around them, her blood rushing with heat and energy, glorying in this physical exertion, the receding noise of her thoughts. Her breath like thunder in her ears, she rides him hard, feeling the sweat cling fine to her skin. In the ivory glow of his chaotic loft, he smirks at her and brings his thumb to his mouth. She watches as he licks it with a perfect pink tongue and then finds her clit, rubbing it wet and looking at her face for her reaction. Pleasure ripples through her because fuck him, he does that well, and she gasps and fucks him faster, moaning and moaning until she falls forward onto his chest. His nipples are right there, tiny and perfect, so she bites on them, pulling on the pink, chewing and hurting because it makes him swear and laugh shakily, his fingers digging into her soft sides.

“Come here,” he says in that rough needy way. She moves up to kiss his mouth, to stroke up the contour of his face into his hair. They’re face to face in the warm soft shades of his bed and his loft, sharing breath as his lips catch hers and his eyes glimmer dark blue this close, his big hands cradling her bottom, urging her on. 

It’s almost too much, this intimacy. 

Just as she tries to pull back, he rolls them in one quick bold movement, and her breath catches at the sight of him looming over her. All pale freckled skin, beautifully shaped shoulders as he braces one hand in the sheets by her shoulder, and pushes her arms up over her head. She crosses her wrists, and he holds them in place with one hand, dipping his head to kiss her with his warm open and utterly filthy mouth. The sheets are rumpled around his clenching bare arse, she lifts her legs free of them, knees up so he gets deeper into her. Some neon sign flickers on outside and washes the bed in eerie pale green, makes it look like they’re underwater. And he settles into a steady deep rhythm that makes her want to cry with sheer beauty. 

He watches her with his lovely changeful eyes, breathing hard, fucking her at this fluid endless pace that gets her wetter and wetter, seizing softer and softer around his cock. He’s not going to stop until she comes, she knows that, and she’s not going to fake it this time to just get it over with. And he’s catching her sweet spot, right where the sensation is so keen and perfect, closer and closer, eyes shutting, heart speeding up, her breathing a storm, skin so hot and slipping against the sheets, that fire coiling deeper and deeper, tighter and tighter at the core of her, until she gives in and cries out with the sheer terrible power of this pleasure.

He stops, holds agonised still as she comes down. When she opens her eyes, so very shaken, the corner of his strained mouth quirks. “Come on,” she says softly, stroking her hands up his arms because she can afford to be tender now with him. “Don’t you want to --”

“Wanna come inside you,” he mutters, dark hair stuck to his temples.

“Don’t you fucken dare,” she snaps, thrown into the abrupt realisation that they haven’t used protection.

He laughs a short brutal laugh, fucks her in one, two, three quick thrusts that make her gasp. Then he pulls out and takes hold of his glistening red cock, and she watches as he splatters hot wet white all over her thigh in the strange green flickerlight.

“Figures,” he manages, collapsing onto his back next to her. 

“What?”

“Figures you’d be one of those girls.”

She pushes up on one elbow, grabbing a fold of sheet to wipe off her thigh. “What? The kind of girl who’s too smart to be impregnated by the likes of you? Or the kind of girl who lets a guy come on her?”

His fine pretty mouth curves as he bends one arm under his head. The green neon flickers off, and now he’s all ivory warm again as he grins up at the rafters. “Both, I reckon.”

She unhooks her bra and tosses it to the floor, her voice soft and snide as she snuggles beside him. “And I suppose you’ve fucked both kinds in this bed.”

He turns his head a little, giving her a very cool arrogant look. 

“Yeah, I have.”

As they stare at each other, the air simmering with a kind of danger, he adds, “How many have you fucked in your bed?”

She lets her mouth curl with a perfectly malevolent smile, enjoying her capacity to be like this. “Oh, I doubt you’ll ever know.”

He snorts, apparently letting go of it, and the tension eases. As he twists around, reaching off his side of the bed, his voice is muffled. “Gunna stay the night?”

“Would you like me to?” she counters, her tone neutral now.

He comes back up with a cigarette between his lips, setting it aflame before tossing the lighter down. She watches him stretch and settle amid the rumpled blue sheets, her mouth curving with affectionate recognition. This is the sight of a certain type of Aussie male post-coitus. 

“Yeah, why not,” he drawls, his eyes an ironic pretty blue with those dark lashes flicking up. “Might have another go, you never know.”

“Gosh,” she replies dryly, and he laughs.

No one but you.

____________

 

They sleep with the deep exhaustion of a night well spent. At some point in the pale lilac hours, he wakes her and fucks her in a dreamy wordless way, all sighs and caresses, before they drift back into sleep, limbs tangled in the sheets smelling of sex and warm flesh.

She wakes to the smell of coffee and the sound of running water, both sensations unfamiliar enough that she blinks her eyes open, squinting against the sunlight that floods in through the big windows. It feels like mid-morning, and she realises in a second where she is. Turning over, grabbing the sliding sheet, she pushes her hair out of her eyes. The faucet is going on the copper bathtub, and he’s humming quietly, barechested and reading something at the kitchen bench with a steaming cup before him.

With a stifled groan, she flops back into the pillow. This is why she hardly ever does one night stands at other people’s places. It’s so much easier to kick someone out in the morning and open the windows to air out the apartment than it is to put last night’s clothes back on and make her way through the grimy city, longing for home. Not exactly walk of shame, more like cab ride of feminist overthinking and slight self-loathing.

Her clothes have been tossed on the foot of the bed. Grateful, she collects them and walks naked to the bathroom, refusing to be self-conscious after everything they’ve done. Of course he hasn’t thought to put a spare toothbrush out for her. With a sigh, she decides to go rootling through his cabinet on the off chance he has a new one somewhere. There is no way she’s going outdoors without brushing her teeth. On the other hand, maybe if she was as sophisticated as she pretends, she’d have brought her own damned toothbrush.

When she feels human again, teeth brushed and enough dignity reasserted to face the world, she comes back out, running her hands through her hair.

He’s in the copper tub, bubbles heaped around him, damp curls, a cigarette dangling from his lips, cup of coffee on the sun dappled floor, and a script in hand. He looks up at her, his smile quirking. “Oh, hello.”

She did mean to leave but the sight of him there, naked and wet, one ankle propped on the tub rim, makes her pause.

“Good morning,” she says and pulls the straps down on her singlet. He grins and tosses the script to the floor.

The water is cool and silky, scented with citrus. She’s not going to mind smelling like this for the rest of the day. He traps her against the curved side of the tub, and licks her face as he fucks sweet and steady into her. It’s actually quite fun, a little heartwarming uncomplicated pleasure in the mid-morning as some gravelly folk song plays.

“You have terrible taste in music,” she tells him as she gets dressed for the second time.

“Ah well.” He’s lazing in the tub, most of the bubbles gone, as he lights another cigarette. “You knew this already. Not all of us can be terrible snobs.”

“This is true,” she admits with satisfaction.

“Hold on,” he says as she heads towards the front door.

“No, you don’t have to --” she starts but he’s already getting out of the tub, grabbing a towel to dry himself off.

A little uncertain, she waits and manages a half smile as he comes towards her. “Right, bye,” she says briskly and kisses him quick on the mouth. 

But he catches her around the waist and turns her back for a series of long lingering kisses that make her heart stampede with panic. It’s nothing, it’s nothing, just this tall beautiful naked man wrapping his strong arms around her clothed body, bare thighs brushing her, cock warm between them, this man kissing her with the scent of cool citrus and the taste of coffee. 

“So maybe I’ll call you,” he says, all flippant and lighthearted, as she leaves. 

She knows better. “Maybe.”

He calls precisely four hours later.


	2. spread all the ashes around

“Let’s go out tonight. Like properly out --”

“It’s Sunday,” she reminds him.

“Yeah? So? I’ll get you home before midnight,” he says, his voice rich with humour.

She grins out the window of her bedroom, phone at her ear. “Before I turn into a pumpkin?”

“And six white mice.”

This sensation like delicious happiness, so weirdly unexpected with him. “Okay, where are we going? Dinner?”

“Play,” he announces cheerfully. “I’ve been given tickets to this thing at the Old Fitz. It’ll be great --”

“That place is a firetrap.”

“-- I know the cast -- yeah, but you’ll see fucken good theatre before you go up in flames. Well, probably good theatre. Come on.”

She meets him there, outside the tiny pub on the corner crammed with people. He grins at her and straightens up from where he’s been leaning against the tiled wall, tossing his cigarette away. Moss green long sleeved tee pushed up to his elbows and faded blue jeans, his dark hair in tamed curls. He’s so ridiculously sexual and attractive she feels a little sick with nerves, half unable to believe she’s allowed herself to get involved with this man who could hurt her heart so badly.

He seems to read something in her face as she approaches because his smile dims, his eyes sharpen. And maybe her voice is a little arch as she says hello. He doesn’t touch her as they push their way into the pub. But on the narrow stairs down to the theatre, she stumbles and he catches her arm. “Jesus,” she says breathlessly, “I forgot what this place is like.”

“Yeah,” he replies with a short laugh. “Not for claustrophobics.”

They sit right up on the topmost tier of cushioned seats. As the small theatre fills up, they read through the pamphlet. His energy is contained, not all charm and not all hostility. She gets the sense he’s taking his cue from her, and that’s a kind of relief. Because she’s really not sure what the hell they’re trying to build here. So maybe it’s enough to focus on the moment and simply interact as two intelligent adults at a play. Rather than the complicated fucked up messes they both are.

Or maybe that’s just her. Maybe this toxicity is just a phase for him, a time of darkness until the light comes back into his eyes. As he points out his friends in the cast list, telling her in an undertone where he knows them from, she watches him with a slight bewilderment. He’s so different from the messy fuck she knows from the nightclub, this careful reserve, almost a gentleman. But then the damage shows in his face, the slight thickness to his features, the bags under his eyes, the wary glint of blue. She notices and it moves something in her, responding to that so much harder than his effort to be gallant.

“Don’t,” she says quietly as the lights dim and he glances sideways at her. She looks beyond his shoulder, keeping him in her periphery. “You don’t have to go all bland and polite with me.” 

The stage starts to glow blue, changing the contours and shapes of his face as he watches her. “I know what you’re like,” she explains, trying to keep her tone neutral. “And you know what I’m like. Let’s not pretend to be anything else.”

He doesn’t say anything. They focus their attention on the play starting. She can feel him thinking next to her, a certain vibrating intensity. And then about ten minutes in, he curves his hand around the top of her thigh. She breathes in deep, her skin going hot with memory and new arousal, so damned aware of the people on either side of them. Half wondering if this is a sign of his rage or raw desire. As she dips her chin, trying for some privacy, he moves his hand and strokes the curve of her sex through her jeans. 

She grabs his wrist, the stranger on her other side twitches. And he withdraws his hand, slow enough that it feels like a promise of filth later.

She doesn’t dare look over, so aware of him next to her in the dark, the scent of cigarettes and skin that she’s starting to recognise, aware of his breathing, the warm fierce shape of his body and all the dangerous intent of him.

Luckily the play catches her interest enough to split her attention. It’s one act, powerful and weird, and over soon enough. They have drinks with the cast and crew in the bar, she recognises a few theatre friends because Sydney is such a small scene after all. He leans in and says at her ear, “Let’s get out of here.”

They stop to get food on the way to her apartment, talking plays as they wait for their order. His reserve dissolves with the fierceness of his opinions, it makes her glad. They don’t argue, more in agreement and curious interest about where they differ. She thinks the play was a good examination of toxic Aussie masculinity. He thinks it was a little too derivative. “But doesn’t that help, isn’t that part of it, drawing on the familiar tropes of Aussie culture and recognisable men?” she points out.

He grimaces, putting the cigarette to his lips as he looks down at the footpath. “Not like that, it didn’t have to be so fucken tired, the same old cliches of the drunk and the abuser --”

“Cos that isn’t a reality of Aussie men still?”

His eyes flick up to hers, clever blue grey catching light from the brightness of the Thai restaurant. “Fair point,” he acknowledges, “but it still feels fucken over-represented on Australian stages. A fucken lack of nuance and not really, really digging into it, into why we are the way we are.”

She touches him without conscious decision, just her fingertips against the green weave of his top. “So you wanted to know why the dad was the way he was, what made him lash out.”

“Yeah.” He’s looking at her mouth, drawing on his smoke. “Unpacking the inner life of characters, of humanity. Isn’t that why we --”

He stops and takes the cigarette out, his mouth soft and vulnerable as he tilts his head and touches his lips to hers. Something releases in her chest, fingertips curling in soft green as she tips her chin up and kisses him back, soft and tentative, because all this feels so new and a little strange and maybe she likes the oddness of it, this sense of unchartered waters, of danger pushed a little further away. He tastes acrid and warm, it makes her wonder if she really has developed a latent addiction to him.

Their order is called, makes them move apart with some reluctance. He puts his cigarette, pinched between thumb and forefinger, back to his mouth, his expression hidden from her as they go up to collect their food bags. Napkins, cutlery, all good. Walking the few blocks to her place, she feels a weird desire to take his arm. His shoulder brushes hers as they talk food and the best Thai in Sydney and Melbourne.

Her apartment is all warm wooden furniture and white upholstery, touched with red from the neon cursive text on the wall that says Survive. As she gets out plates and proper cutlery, he wanders around to look at the books and DVDs, while the music plays low and dark. She sees him smirk at the long framed print of Katharine Hepburn in the stage production of The Philadelphia Story, tall and ice cold haughty in floaty chiffon.

“What?” she challenges when he comes towards her in the kitchen.

He grins, the tip of his tongue flicking out between his teeth. “Nothing. I’m just amused.”

“By what,” she says even though she’s warily sure she knows.

Very cheeky, he doesn’t reply and kisses her instead. With such boldness she’s a little startled, taking a step back as his hands seize her waist and his mouth invades hers. 

“Food,” she manages, catching his bare forearms.

“Later.” He’s tugging her out from behind the kitchen counter, insistent and rather irresistible. 

Twining her arms around his neck, she runs her fingers into his curls and remembers. “The tom yum will get cold …”

He picks her up off her feet, making her gasp, her legs wrapping around his hips. “Don’t care. Where’s your bed?”

Clothes shed on the way, stopping to grope and snog against the wall. This uncomplicated sexual enjoyment even though she knows sex is always complicated but this feels so good she wants to pretend just for a little while. He fumbles a condom out, tossing his wallet to the floor, trying to kiss her at the same time. She’s not really helping, rubbing her bare sharp nipples against his chest because it distracts him with hunger, and licking his beautiful shoulders while he swears at her and rolls the condom onto his cock. Then she does kiss him, closing her soft hand around his hardness. He sighs into her mouth, clasping her flesh. 

Voluptuary, she thinks hazily.

They fuck with a smooth lovely confidence now, a pleasing familiarity as he pushes her on her stomach off the side of the bed and she braces a hand on the floor, all kitten whimpers of pleasure when he’s moving steady and deep in her. His teeth nipping the edge of her ear, his cock big and slick, pushing on her insides. She laughs breathlessly at the feel of his chest against her back, his weight on his arms braced on the edge of the bed. White sheets, golden wooden floorboards, the heat of his skin on hers. He rides her til she comes in ripples and soft cries, and groans into her hair as he spends himself inside her.

“How come you don’t have Marilyn up?” he asks a while later as they eat in bed.

“Because I hold her in my heart,” she replies, slightly taken aback.

_____________

 

They keep more or less to themselves for the next two weeks. Well, she assumes he hasn’t told their mutual friends because no one says anything to her. At first she’s relieved to find he’s not one of those lovers who has to talk every single day. But then when he starts to text her random thoughts and observations, she’s too amused and drawn in to mind. 

Between their various work commitments, it’s a few days before they see each other. He suggests a movie at the Chauvel, he wants them to see Death In Venice together. She calls him an irredeemable wanker which makes him laugh uproariously. But she’s always had a soft spot for the queerness of Dirk Bogarde, and chances are he noticed that from her film collection. She’s certainly not going to pass up the chance to see Death In Venice on the big screen.

“Have you read it?” she asks as they walk up the slope of Oxford Street. 

He nods, rolling up a sleeve, the wind stirring his hair. “Yep. Brilliant writing, just brilliant. I have a lot of time for Thomas Mann.”

“Well, yeah, you’d need it,” she quips, unable to resist.

He laughs, eyes sparkling with glee. “You’ve read it, I saw it --”

“Yep.” She smiles at the lovely heritage building before them. “Best and probably only translated work I’ve ever read to the end. It was so flawless I actually forgot I wasn’t reading it in the original German.”

His smile widens as he looks down at his other sleeve. “Amazing, right? All that heavy beautifully articulated shit about art and intellect, about the life lived but not fully fucken **_experienced_**.”

As they round the corner towards the cinema entrance, she smiles at him for a long wry moment. He gets it, a half smile back and a little huff of understanding. “And didn’t do that us a world of good,” he says with so much irony.

It’s not that she’s told him her entire life story, all the stupid crushes and futile relationships, all the hurt and confusion, all the pseudo spiritual rationalising in telling herself she’s learnt from each relationship, that they weren’t all wasted time and emotion. But from the months of group discussions and random conversations in the clubs, he seems to have worked it out. Her smile fading, she says nothing and goes in when he holds the door open for her.

The movie lives up to all the arthouse hype, long and scratchy and indulgent and ultimately devastating. As she blinks back tears at the end, her heart full of grief and understanding, beside her, she realises he’s had a hand over his mouth for the whole final scene. 

“But then,” she continues as they walk down the stairs to the street, “he’s annihilated by the experience of living. Of loving.”

They emerge into the afternoon sunshine, both reaching for their shades.

“Is he, though?” he asks, squinting up at the sky as he wipes his sunnies on his shirt. “Or is it because he loved where he was not loved in return, where there was no hope of love back? Consumed by the beautiful boy in that classical Greek tradition.”

“Yeah,” she replies, turning that over in her head as they wander up the street. “No, wait, **_allowing_** himself to be consumed. He didn’t have to do what he did, make an ass out of himself, endanger his health by -- wait, was he ill before he went to Venice? Was he already dying?”

“Jesus, I’ve forgotten already,” he confesses, his mouth tipping at the corners.

“I know, right? Anyway, you know what I mean. Don’t blame the object when it’s the subject that dooms himself.”

He doesn’t reply for a moment. And then, “Or herself,” he murmurs inexplicably. She looks at him with some surprise but he doesn’t explain, tapping a cigarette out from a packet, his elbow nudging hers as they walk together.

“There’s a Hindi word for that, you know,” she tells him. “Or at least I think it’s Hindi, it may be Urdu.”

He glances at her, his mouth fine and pink around his cigarette as he flicks the flame to the end. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. Fanaa. Destroyed by desire.” She frowns. “I think. Fantastic movie but yeah. Fanaa. Isn’t that a great word?”

The movie was a matinee session, and they spend the afternoon browsing the shelves of Berkelouw. He turns out to be an appalling history nerd, way more than she realised from their club entanglements, and has atrociously dead white male taste in literature. They bicker half seriously about this, about the merits of Austen and Woolf and the Brontës until he declares he needs caffeine to continue the argument. 

Upstairs in the café, she wriggles back into the comfy leather buttoned chair, indescribably happy. The aromas of baked things and coffee is a little intense in these confines, making her slightly queasy. But then he returns with his cup of sustenance and a new tangent to the discussion. “Ursula Le Guin,” he says triumphantly.

“Total legend,” she replies, beaming at him. And they get into an argument about whether science fiction is or isn’t proper literature, which turns out to be a total non-argument because they agree it absolutely is. 

A few days later he presents her with a CD mix he made just for her, a playlist of terrible music that she listens through at least once with an expression of dire sufferance. There are precisely four songs on there she likes, but then it turns out she likes them enough to form a slight fixation. This pleases him immensely. He insists she has way weirder taste in music than he does, so she burns him a playlist just to prove him wrong, with all the most commercial tracks she can think of. He says it’s wonderful and completely bizarre and that it totally proves his point. There are times when she really cannot work out the way his mind works.

“You’ve got silver here,” she says one lazy Sunday morning in bed, stroking the curls back from his temples.

He’s lying half across her, head against her torso as he reads the magazine from the weekend paper. The sheets are swirled around them, white with little red flowers and black stems, pretty against his bare skin all splotchy with pale and tan and freckles. “Mm?” he replies after a moment, his eyes not lifting from the page. “Not a good look, right?”

“No, I like it,” she says, astonishing herself. “It’s interesting. And it’s good you fucken look your age, jesus christ.”

Now he pulls a face at her, making her laugh. “I wonder if it’ll go all silver,” she says thoughtfully, combing her fingertips through and tugging so the curl straightens out to long and smooth. “Whether you’ll end up looking like some silver lion --”

“Fox,” he murmurs, having returned to the George Miller feature article.

“Some sort of animal, anyway,” she says, teasing.

“Noble sexy animal, excuse me,” he retorts, his laughing eyes flicking up at her. “Totally fuckable animal.”

“Ewww. You are so gross. There’s a name for people like you.”

“Perverts?” he offers and kisses the bare tip of her breast.

She hears herself giggle. “Furry. Same thing.”

“I’m just kinky, baby,” he says, all smiles and sunshine. “That’s why you fuck me.”

“This is true.”

It’s a peculiar sort of middle ground. Having fun together, enjoying each other, all the while knowing that they don’t have to pretend to be on their best behaviour. But she still has to pretend hardness, to herself and to him, like he’s not getting to her heart with his sweetness and his joy, and that simmering current of resentment and rage that she sees turned out at his career now. 

He fumes about it to her, the little frustrations and the big disappointments, the narrowness of the Australian industry, the deafening silence overseas, the preconceptions he has to struggle against, the rival who keeps manoeuvring him out of opportunities. She shares in his rage, understands that thwarted ambition both in his case and in her own. 

It binds them together far more than romance.

_____________

 

Two weeks pass, and she takes a test to confirm a nagging suspicion.

She tells him that night outside the club. In the little cobblestoned square with dark bushes and the stink of piss, drunken young things reeling past, the muffled thump of music from the pub next door.

“I’m pregnant.”

He goes very still, his eyes wide on her in the refracted citylight. She doesn’t wait for a response, barrelling on so she can get out all she had rehearsed. “It must have been the second time, in the early morning at your place. That’s the only time I can’t remember you actually pulling out. I told you,” she bursts out, overcome with distress, “I fucken told you! You knew how I felt about --”

His eyes blaze fury, he advances on her, finger raised. “Oh no, no, no, don’t you fucken dare -- we were both half asleep -- I didn’t --”

“You were awake enough to fuck me!”

“And you were awake enough to fuck me right back! Don’t you fucken dare make this into something it’s not! You know how careful I’ve been ever since, it was an accident!”

People walking past are giving them strange curious looks. It humiliates her into realising how sordid this conversation is, how sordid the whole situation is.

“Anyway, I’m not keeping it,” she says, quite brutal. “I’m having an abortion. I don’t want kids, I can’t handle a child or even being pregnant. I don’t want any of that.”

His face goes white, so much agitation in the working of his throat, turmoil radiating off him. He stares at her, incandescent with rage, his mind clearly working very fast, churning through so much thought she can’t read. 

Then he turns and walks off.

Shocked, she watches him go. Is she meant to follow him? For what? There’s nothing more to say. Everything’s fallen apart. The tentative relationship they were fashioning in sunshine and enthusiasm and humour, everything’s turned ugly and disintegrated right before her eyes.

She should have known better. She had even told him she did, not so long ago, that she wasn’t like all the other girls, that she knew his limitations and she wouldn’t allow herself to be dragged down by him.

But he’s right, it was an accident. And here and now, she tells herself she’s too practical to indulge in blame and emotion and recrimination. That’s beneath her, that’s not the fucking point. So she goes home, checks the details of the appointment she’s already made. And tries so hard not to drink herself into oblivion just to get through the night. 

She does what she always does in times of dissociation, tries to lose herself in binging a show on boxset. The X Files, season one, right back to the start, numbly watching Mulder and Scully fall in love, watching Scully with the knowledge of all the trauma ahead for her, the abductions and medical invasions, the children she’ll have and lose one way or another. Watching Mulder with the knowledge of all he does and doesn’t do to keep Scully safe, the unforgivable things he keeps from her, all the brutality visited upon Scully to hurt Mulder as part of a classic male hero narrative.

It’s an agony of too much thinking and too much feeling, and she can’t stop any of it.

At four in the morning, her intercom sounds. She knows even as she answers. 

“It’s me,” he says abruptly. “I’m sorry, I won’t -- I just need to say a few things -- I don’t need to come up -- and then I’ll leave.”

In her darkened living room, the red neon buzzes its fatal reminder. Survive. Survive this, you’ve made it through every fucked up situation so far in your chaotic life, grit your teeth and survive this too. 

“Okay.”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have walked away like that, it was rude and stupid and fucked up and I shouldn’t have done that. I want to come with you to the -- to the place. And I’ll pay.”

She stares at the intercom, bewildered. “You can come, yes, I’d like that. But you’re paying half. I’m a part of this too. I think that’s fair. And you do realise --” She stops, maybe it’s better he doesn’t know that bit so she can deal with it on her own.

“What?” His voice is sharp. “What? Tell me.”

She shakes her head. “You can find out during the appointment.” She tells him the date and time and place, that she’ll meet him there.

“All right,” he says, as neutral as possible. “I’ll see you there.”

She knows she should tell a female friend, that she would want to know, would want to be there for her own friends in this situation, and has been. But that would mean talking about him, that would mean possible exposure, hinting at the hurt and disappointment of one more failed relationship, one more ruined possibility. And she doesn’t want to see pity in her friends’ eyes. 

So she doesn’t tell anyone. And in the end, she decides she’d rather go alone. She doesn’t want him to see her vulnerable. 

He completely loses his temper when she calls and tells him. “You cannot fucken do this on your own!”

“I think you’ll find I can,” she says coolly. “Lots of women have before me, lots of women will after me.”

“Lots of women have also --” he stops himself just in time, literally biting the sentence off. She can hear the rage shake his breathing.

“You shouldn’t have to do this on your own,” he says with an effort. 

“I’m going to.”

“Fine,” he snaps. “But I’m giving you half the money and you fucken call me if you need -- just call me, okay?”

She’s not going to call. It may seem very dramatic and arrogant but the truth is it’s something she feels she has to go through on her own, allow herself to feel the whole gamut of conflicting emotions or none at all. Have this experience in private, without having to put on the hard face for someone else or tend to their messy emotions instead of her own.

It’s not like he can’t have children with other women, hell maybe he does already.

____________

 

The clinic is on the North Shore. She drives across the bridge, casting an automatic numb glance at the glittering ivory shape of the Opera House through the iron struts. This here, this life, all the women in this city who have quietly done the same thing she’s going to do, quietly gone through this hell and come out hopefully with the same relief she wants. All the women over the millennia of this inhabited land who have lived and died and survived through the different harrowing versions of this process. All the oblivious men.

Not him, though. She blinks through the sudden awareness of him somewhere in the city. He better not fucking be there at the clinic, she wouldn’t put it past his arrogance, he’s as wilful as she is. They’re an awful match, and she’d be so incredibly angry if he is there, waiting for her.

But no, she parks and walks to the entrance of the clean calm building with its glass walls and plants and soft leather couches. He isn’t there, and she sends a grateful thought out to him somewhere in the city. Sick with nerves or nausea, she can’t tell, but she fills out the forms, pays and takes a seat, waiting to be called. 

There are so many different women in the chairs around her, young nervous girls with their mothers or their friends, older women, all different races and ages. Here though, on the North Shore, they’re of a certain economic bracket. She can tell from their clothes and hair. These are not working class women, these are women born into or attained the slightly upper echelons. She wonders then about the clinics attended by all the other classes of women, where they are in the inner city and outer suburbs, if the clinics there are as cool and quiet and just impersonal enough, if they’re safe from protesters.

The doctor asks her why she wants the termination, and is perfectly neutral when she explains about her mental health and her sole income. Abortion isn’t legal in this state but there are loopholes to be quietly worked through. Her voice shakes but she masters it, silently angry at herself. 

The doctor conducts an ultrasound, cool slick on her flat belly, the startling pressure of the wand, and turns the screen away so she doesn’t see. She’s grateful for that, but still the thousand grainy images from television shows and movies stream through her mind. It’s so early, she reminds herself, there would be hardly anything to see. When the ultrasound is done and she’s cleaned the stuff off, the doctor gives her the two pills, a pamphlet on counselling, and tells her exactly what to expect, what she’ll need to look out for in the days and weeks after. And that of course she can make a follow up appointment any time.

She takes one pill there, drives home in the sunshine and traffic, takes the other one, and puts M*A*S*H on as she waits for it to take effect. Her phone is charged and within reach, she has the pads and towels ready in the bathroom, bottles of water chilling in the fridge. 

The red neon flickers Survive. 

Bracing herself for the next seventy-two hours.

He calls four hours after the appointment. She doesn’t answer and turns the silent phone face down.

The bleeding starts. It’s awful and weirdly satisfying at the same time. A good kind of agony, bleeding out on the loo, cramping and contracting and crying with the effort. Ricocheting between grief for a child with his eyes and her hair, and relief that she won’t have the responsibility of fucking up an innocent child’s life with her incompetence and her mental cruelty. Knowing that this is the right decision because she is not and will probably never be ready.

The bleeding stops and starts. She had hoped it would all happen in one go but no, there’s a little, then nothing, then a lot of blood, then trickling to nothing, and on and on. She’s still cramping and contracting, her body almost alien to her now. It’s like a mini labour, she hadn’t realised until the doctor told her.

When the bleeding slackens off, she puts a pad on and goes back out to the living room, shaken. He’s called three times and texted twice, wanting her to call him back, apologising for being intrusive but still wanting to know how she is. She sits on the couch, hands over her eyes, and knows she can’t let him go unanswered for three days. He’d go berserk.

She texts him back: I shouldn’t have to tend to your damned emotions at this time but yes, it’s happening, it’s fucken weird. I’m fine, at least I think I’m fine. Stop calling and texting. I’ll call if I need help. This could take three days, I don’t need you harassing me.

He takes about ten minutes to respond. She can well imagine him losing his temper and forcing himself to calm down in that time. He texts: I understand that. Can I at least bring you some food?

She groans and then catches her breath at another awful cramp. He really isn’t listening. And it’s manipulation, she recognises this, a not so benevolent form of bullying. But then a treacherous part of her mind thinks maybe he’s earned this, maybe he should be here to witness it, go through this with her. 

She replies: All right. I’ll leave the door unlocked, I may be in the bathroom. Please do not expect to talk about this. Or stay.

He turns up an hour and a half later, she hears the door close and the rustling of bags. “I’m here,” he calls out, and the worry is clear in his voice. She stifles her sobs, her arm braced on the cistern as a contraction moves hard through her. He must not hear her crying, or at least not yet.

When that bout passes, she washes her face, checks that her singlet and pajama shorts are presentable. Her eyes are red and teary, she can’t help that. And still his face flinches when he sees her. She realises the effort it takes for him to stay where he is when he clearly wants to touch her.

“Hey,” he says, his voice strange.

“Hey. What did you get?”

Everything has changed. They will never be the way they were together before.

He’s brought matzo ball soup, a whole roast chicken, a large tabouli, and tub of peanut butter ice cream. That last one makes her grin. “Good thinking,” she murmurs as he puts it in the freezer.

He doesn’t reply, says instead with that same difficult restraint, “Do you want me to serve you now? Can you eat?”

“Yeah, I guess. I am actually hungry,” she realises, surprised. “Where did you get matzo ball soup?”

At the microwave, he gives her a slightly withering look over his shoulder. “Double Bay,” he replies as if it’s obvious. She eats a bit of tabouli, reflecting that it’s probably the same tone she uses when people ask where to get biryani.

He makes her up a large plate of chicken and tabouli with a bowl of soup, and carries it to the coffee table in the living area. His hair is all messy curls, his tee stained and a little torn, cargo trousers scuffed at the edges, his sneakers old and dirty.

“Didn’t you have stuff on today?” she asks, one hand on the couch. There’s a cramp coming on.

“Mm?” He straightens up, his eyes unreadable blue grey. “Nah, it’s fine. Nothing important.”

He’s lying. She knows he had meetings today, pretty important career stuff. The cramp seizes her hard, she hunches over, biting her lower lip deep. Cramps have never been part of her menstrual experience, this agony is completely new. If he reacts, she doesn’t see it. When she recovers, his expression is this hideous mix of vulnerability and guilt quickly concealed, smoothing out to cool composure.

“Right,” he says briskly, moving towards the door, taking out his car keys. “I’ll be off. You have my --”

“I’m rewatching M*A*S*H,” she says slowly, feeling a bleed start. “Do you like M*A*S*H?”

“Love it,” he replies without missing a beat, something clear and lovely in his eyes, the muscles of his face relaxing. “Wait, all of it?” he calls out as she turns and hurries towards the bathroom. “Aren’t there like fifteen seasons?”

“Eleven,” she yells back and shuts the door fast.

There are clots, so much blood like a heavy period, and then eventually sometime during the afternoon, halfway through the fourth ep they watch together, there is the tiniest white sac sinking into the red of the toilet bowl. She stares at it for the longest time, her hand on the flush button. Her whole body is going hot and cold. And then she reminds herself, it’s over, it’s done, it’s for the best.

(There will be other chances.)

She flushes the loo, and has a quick shower, trying not to think of anything. It isn’t over, the uterine lining needs to shed completely. She knows this. But it feels like the worst has happened now. 

And he’s out there on the couch, licking the spoon clean of ice cream as the episode continues. It’s one of her favourites, the one with young painfully beautiful Ron Howard, the episode when the whole show pivots from comedy to drama. She had insisted they skip ahead to it.

When she opens the door, he’s right there, taking a hasty step back. She can’t say anything, she just looks at him. And he understands somehow, his whole face crumples, and he comes towards her. “Oh god,” he says softly, his hands on her face, his forehead to hers. “God, I’m so sorry.”

For a moment, she wants to put her arms around his waist and let him hold her, let him have this pain. But everything feels too raw now, she moves away. He follows her back to the couch where they watch the rest of the episode, not touching.

“It’s such a good line,” she says quietly as the credits roll.

“Sometimes you hear the bullet,” he replies, his voice level.

“And then the topper. That he really didn’t hear the bullet that ends his life.”

“Mmm.” His hand twitches on the couch between them. “I like the Ronny Howard storyline, though.”

“Yeah, it’s great.”

“That line of never forgiving Hawkeye for as long as he lives.”

“Let’s hope it’s a long healthy hate,” they say together, repeating Hawkeye’s answer. 

In the midst of death, there is life. In the midst of life, there is death. 

She becomes aware that she’s smiling, and it fades. Wishing he wasn’t here, she gets up from the couch and goes to her room, wanting nothing more than to climb into bed and cry softly, waiting for the rawness of her emotions to heal.

_____________

 

In her bed of dark blue sheets, sunshine falling across the floorboards, she lies on her side, tears leaking into the pillow. The cramps continue, she can hear him moving around the apartment, clearing up. Music comes on, soft and familiar. It makes her cry harder, the kindness of him. 

When his footsteps near, she swallows her tears, thankful that her back is to him.

“Do you want me to leave?” he asks with that same careful lack of inflection.

“No,” she says without having to think about it. “You can come lie down with me if you want.”

He sits on the side of the bed to take off his sneakers. Her hand curled by her cheek on the pillow, she watches the particles of dust drift down the sunshine against white curtains. And when he lies down beside her, he takes a moment before placing a gentle hand on her arm. It makes her feel delicate, like she could break. She cries more and more, angry at herself for the grief and also understanding why, trying to accept this sense of loss.

He lets her go on for a good long while, his energy agitated. When her sobs space out, he puts his arm around her and hugs her close, his face against her hair, his clothed chest firm at her back. She touches his hand, the first time she’s allowed herself to make physical contact with him since this began. And looks down at the shapes of his fingers on her, broad and blunt and so fair, the nails pink and trimmed, a white Aussie male hand without pretension, capable of so much brutality and tenderness.

She turns over then, needing to see him. With enough space between them, his eyes are red around the edges, tear tracks on his cheeks. She smiles a little at the sight, how attractive and seductive is the sight of a man brave enough to cry, all that it says about the heterosexual struggle of power. The blue of his eyes is very clear and searching, waiting for her to speak.

“There may not be other chances,” she says, her throat dry and scratchy. It’s not what she had meant to say but now she follows the thought, huge and terrifying as it is. “I’m -- I didn’t think of that before. The older I get, the harder it is, the riskier it gets. That --” she takes a painful breath “-- may have been my last chance.”

“It isn’t,” he says with instant ferocity. It’s adorable and she has to resist.

“You don’t know that. There’s no alarm bell that rings and says this is your last viable egg, this is your last chance to have a child. You just go into -- well, not you,” she says wryly. “Me. I, I won’t know until it’s too late.”

“There are different ways to be a mother,” he says, the line of his mouth firm.

“Yes.” She thinks about it. “That’s true. And that’s something I’ll have to remember. When I’m ready, if I’m ever ready. It’s not as if the world is empty of kids who need families.”

“Exactly.”

After a little while of this breathing warm silence, she says softly, looking at his throat, “Can we talk about this, please? For ten minutes? For ten minutes, can we please talk about the child we might have had?”

He flinches, completely distraught.

“It’s okay if you don’t want to,” she says hastily. “I just thought -- I thought it might help.”

“What if it doesn’t?” he retorts.

“Then it doesn’t. Then I deal with it.”

“And me?” he fires back. “How am I supposed to --” he bites off his words, his hand curling on the sheet between them. All the rage and resentment of him that burns so close to the surface.

“Okay,” she says, secretly delighted at this violence, and trying to keep her tone very calm. “You’re angry with me for doing this, for making the decision without you --”

“No, I’m not,” he interrupts, eyes flashing. “I know it’s your decision to make, I realise it’s your body, not mine. I understand that, I am not some fucking neanderthal!”

“But you’re still angry …”

“Yes!” He pushes away from her, his voice rising. “I’m fucken angry because it was so appallingly easy for you to decide I wasn’t worthy --”

“It had nothing to do with you.”

“That is not how it feels! That is not --” he breaks off and takes a deep breath, his fist curling. She sees his nails digging into his palm, the whiteness of his knuckles pushing against skin. He uses his words to hurt other people, he uses his flesh to hurt himself.

As she watches, his rage subsides to a deep sad calm. And in that same neutral tone, he looks at her and says simply, “Maybe I wanted to have a child with you.”

A horror goes through her, silent and contained.

“But I wasn’t even asked,” he continues, his eyes stormy. “I wasn’t -- you didn’t even consider the possibility.”

“You can have a child with anyone you want.”

“But not with you.”

She takes a little too long to answer, and his eyes sharpen on her. “Not right now, no,” she says with great difficulty. “And don’t -- please don’t --”

“I know.” He laughs. “Don’t get my fucken hopes up, right?”

“Jesus!” She rears backs, losing her patience. “There are a thousand women in this damned city who would happily have a kid with you -- why do you -- no, wait, don’t answer that. No, I know why. It’s because I said I didn’t want to, and your fucken male entitlement can’t handle that.”

“Yeah,” he says with irony. “That’s exactly it.”

“Oh shut up.”

They lie in fuming silence as the sun changes across the walls, across the warm blue sheets.

Eventually, eyes closed, she says softly, “It’d be a girl.”

He stays quiet, listening and probably watching her with those perfectly shaped pretty eyes.

“A tiny girl with your eyes and my hair, and we’d call her Kate. Not Katharine. Kate. Or Katie when she’s young.” She looks up at the ceiling, the patterns of sun and shade as the wind moves the foliage on the trees outside. “And she’d be clever and mischievous and very, very wilful. She’d throw tantrums and screaming fits and drive us completely bonkers. She’d be all the worst and best qualities of us combined. But then she’d be the sweetest little thing and come to us for cuddles and stories and when she’s had a fight with her best friend --”

“Jesus fucken christ,” he says brokenly and his face appears before her, warm and vulnerable as he cradles her jaw with his big hands and kisses her, his mouth so soft and speaking and tender. She wraps her fingers around his wrists, breathes through the lessening pain, and whispers, “Now you.”

He rests his forehead against hers for a moment, then lifts enough to tell her, “I thought it might be a boy. Your eyes and my nose --”

“What’s wrong with my nose?” she interrupts, bristling.

“Nothing, it’s a good nose. For a girl. My nose is better.”

“Fuck your nose.”

“Yes, excellent point well made,” he says acidly, his hands slackening on her.

As she bites a smile down, he moves to lie next to her, on his back, looking up at the ceiling. “I think he’d be quite a shy little fellow, very sensitive.”

“What’s his name?” she asks, curling on her side to watch him.

“Marcus Aurelius.”

She splutters. “It is not. You wouldn’t.”

“Tiberius Octavius,” he announces, a very silly man.

“As long as it’s not Nero.”

“Cicero.”

“Such a wanker. Does he like to read?”

With a grin, he turns towards her, all boyish and sweet, his charm such a heartbreaking irresistible thing. “He loves to read. Only he doesn’t like any of the books his parents like --”

“Well, he’s only small. He’ll learn.”

“This is true. He likes sword fights. And animals. He’s very good with animals, he’s always bringing some stray cat or creature home. And he gets very upset when we tell him he can’t keep them.”

“We’re awful parents.”

“Well, no, see, we already got him a dog. He has a very good healthy happy dog called Mildred who’s grown up with him and keeps him company.”

They dream aloud as the sun goes down and the air grows heavier. “Poor little Cicero,” she murmurs sleepily. “Never enough room in the house for his menagerie.”

He curls his little finger around hers on the dark blue sheet, his voice low and warm. “Maybe he’ll grow up to be a zookeeper. At Taronga.”

“Oh, that’s lovely. That’d be so lovely.”

_______________

 

She sleeps for what feels like hours, waking with a small start to find herself in his arms, the room doused in evening shades. “Sokay,” he mumbles, patting her on the back. “It’s just me.”

“I know it’s you, fool,” she mutters, getting out of bed, heading for the bathroom.

He leaves the next morning, reluctant. Her bleeding continues on and off for a couple of weeks, but with each day she feels stronger, more at ease with what happened and more able to resume her life. He spends a lot of time at her apartment, cooking and arguing and watching movies with her, reading her books and using her computer to look up obscure references which he then feels the need to share with her. He doesn’t actually move in, he doesn’t even keep clothes at her place, and that’s fine with her.

It feels like they’re gentler with each other. Not in a scared breakable way. It’s not just him taking care of her. They’re kinder to each other, and she feels a certain protectiveness of him now. Maybe this was exactly what she feared, this susceptibility to him, maybe it makes her exactly the girl she said wasn’t. But it’s started now, she feels it now, and what they’ve been through together binds them in a softness that she doesn’t want to shatter just yet.

The bleeding slows until she’s no longer unnerved, even vaguely annoyed by it. “Longest period **_ever_** ,” she tells him at one point. He looks alarmed, and then realises and grins back. She’s already sent him on supermarket runs to bring her pads, there’s very little embarrassment left on that score.

And of course with perfectly awful timing, one of their mutual friends announces a pregnancy. As the group erupts in cheers and congratulations around the restaurant table, she gives him a small bitter smile. He picks up her hand and kisses the back of it, his eyes very soft and ironic.

Their friends are entirely unsurprised that they’re together, say it’s about bloody time they came out of the shadows. She blushes and tells them to fuck off, while he roars with laughter like some unhinged fool.

They rejoin the Sydney nightlife, attending gigs together as festival season begins. At the stadium concerts with the heat and roar of a few thousand people, she stands with her back against his chest, his arms folded around her, watching the blaze of colours, the music thundering against them both. At the Annandale with their tribe, watching a friend’s band play the main stage, the blue wall behind the bar catching the coloured lights. She had forgotten how good that felt, to watch a band rock out onstage while someone held her in happy silence.

When she yells something at him, he bends his head to her lips and then smiles at her, all pretty eyes and sweet crooked mouth. One hand wrapped around a beer, the other on her hip. They’re so fucking cool together, she knows that, in their jeans and band tees, her wild rock chick hair and his soft silvered curls, low slung belts and black leather wrist cuffs. He’s stolen a fine red corded bracelet from her jewellery box and has been wearing it whenever they go out.

It really is a relationship, she can’t deny that now. She buys him new plants for his loft and waters them because of course he forgets, clears up the ashtrays and snaps at him when he doesn’t. He just grins and kisses her, so ridiculously sweet she can’t stay mad at him. 

He gets comfortable enough that one day he announces he absolutely fucking hates the neon Survive, and can he buy her something else instead to put up?

She’s so taken aback she agrees just to see what he picks. “And anyway, I have power of veto,” she reminds him.

He rolls his eyes and assures her he’ll find something wonderful. She points out rather kindly that his idea of wonderful is a pinball machine.

For some reason, he doesn’t find that helpful. Or amusing.

____________

 

They watch River of No Return, lazily entangled on the couch. It’s not a great film by any means, even if it is Preminger. But he very much appreciates Marilyn’s subdued cynicism and her long platinum hair. When he says so, his head against her breasts, his legs sprawled across hers, she smiles at him, deeply happy and strangely used to the sensation now.

He’s so different to what he was when they first met, when this all began. It’s been less than a year since that first glimpse in the nightclub, and she wonders now if the light has come back into his eyes, or if she just wants that to be the case. It’s a frightening treacherous thought that slides around the back of her mind as she combs her fingertips through the silver in his curls.

“Is this always what you’re like?” she asks on an impulse.

“What? I’m watching -- shut up -- what?” He’s totally distracted now, lifting his eyes to her face. “What am I like when?”

“In a relationship,” she says, quietly proud of saying the word without freaking out. “Are you always like this?”

He thinks very fast, eyes flicking away from her, a lot of complex emotion crossing his expressive face. And she sees how he goes for an attempt at flippancy, half serious at the same time. “I guess. Depends on --”

“The relationship, yeah. Fair enough.” She returns her attention to the movie, her cheek against his hair. 

But the thought’s been planted now. “Why?” he demands, grabbing the remote to pause the film and pushing himself to sit up. “Why did you ask me that?”

“I don’t know --”

“Yeah, you do. Why? This isn’t what you thought I’d be like?”

She screws up her mouth, honest enough to admit, “No, I didn’t. I thought you’d be all toxic and --”

“Nasty.”

She lifts her hands. “That’s what we were like at the start, weren’t we? I didn’t know any better. And I’m sure you didn’t know about me.”

His mouth curls, wry and fond. “Yeah, you’re still nasty.”

“Fuck off,” she says with a grin, unoffended, settling back against the cushions. “I think I’m sweet.”

He doesn’t catch the Philadelphia Story quote but that’s okay, he will when they get around to watching that.

“No, I --” she starts to explain, looking at her nails instead of him. “I was just thinking how some people are really only the best versions of themselves when they’re in relationships. And I was wondering --” she glances at him “-- if you’re one of those people.”

His face softens, so beautiful with his bold cheekbones and freckled skin. “You think this is the best version of me?”

She shrugs, not trusting herself to speak. 

“Aww,” he croons, moving closer to her, mischievous and lethally sweet, “is that the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me? Is this a declaration of **_feelings_**?”

“Oh my god,” she mutters, sinking mortified against the cushion, her face hot as she tries to fend him off. “Go away, you’re horrible.”

He laughs soft and rich, and kisses her in his own sweet sincere way. It makes her melt, her fingers curling in his tee, tilting her chin up to kiss him deeper. Her fingers creep into his hair, her legs wrapping around his. His breathing gets a bit ragged, he licks down her throat, pushing his hand up under her top. She grasps the back of his head as she sits up, and pulls him so she can kiss him at her most honest, most confident when they’re doing this. They shed the tees, letting them spill to the floor as they return to lying on the couch, all warm breath and soft flesh and wet mouths.

He rubs the palm of his hand up along her sternum, watching her sigh and shiver as he strokes up between her bare breasts and along the side of her throat. It’s a caress of such tender possession she moans and blushes with as much emotion as arousal. He covers her body with his, his mouth soft and hot on hers, and she wraps her arms around him, resting her hands on the smooth deep curve of his back.

“Why?” he murmurs, his lips sliding against her cheek. “Aren’t you?”

“Mm?”

He pushes up on his elbows braced on either side of her head, and gazes down at her, all clear blue grey eyes. “You’re not at your best in a relationship?”

She makes a face, wanting to avoid exposing this truth to him. But then a kind of self-sabotaging curiosity makes her reconsider. Her fingertips stroking around the small points of his nipples, she admits, “It’s different for me.”

“Why?” he challenges softly, and drops his weight onto her, grinning as she oofs and tries to push him off. When they’re lying side by side, crammed happily together on the narrowness of the couch, she takes in a breath and tells him. “Because I’m a woman. Because me being in a relationship isn’t the same as you, especially a heterosexual one. Because I’m raised with so much toxic shit about my female function in a het relationship that I’ve had to unlearn --”

He’s frowning at her. “Like what? I’m not fucken making you cook or clean -- I’m the one doing all the goddamned cooking! And you’re the one obsessed with the --”

“Not that,” she breaks in, exasperated. “Like this idea that I as a woman can heal a wounded man, that my life will only really be fulfilled when I’m in a romantic relationship along with all the other markers of success like a career and money and mental health and manageable beauty standards. There is so fucken much for me to --”

“As opposed to me?” he interrupts, his brows raising with a certain scepticism. “You think we straight men aren’t indoctrinated with that bullshit too? Why we keep chasing relationships, because I’m not a fucken man unless I’m --”

“Fucking some woman?” she suggests delicately.

He has enough grace to blush as he admits, “Well, yeah. And it’s bullshit, I know it is. Toxic romantic fucken delusions, that whole notion that the right person will heal you and save you from yourself.”

“Pretty seductive bullshit, though,” she murmurs, touching the corner of his weird mouth.

“I know,” he replies darkly. “And don’t think I haven’t fucken --” he nods. “We’ve all fallen for that shit. And for us men, you know, it’s that fucken myth that we’re going to be healed and saved by one woman’s good love, and that we’re not going to be truly properly happy until we’re husbands and fathers, head of the family, giving her everything -- **_everything_** \-- in return.”

“Except,” she says quietly, “you’re the centre of both stories. Don’t you see? In both versions, I function to serve you. And that sucks.”

He goes silent, a tiny frown between his brows as he looks at her and thinks, turning that over in his mind. “And that’s why --”

“That’s why I can’t ever be sure that the best version of me is the one in a romantic relationship. Especially with a man.”

His eyes go dark, hooding with turmoil. Her fingertips trailing down his chest, she looks distractedly past him at the screen, the frozen image of Marilyn so casual and comfortable in her blue jeans and sexy off shoulder white top. 

“Remember our first argument?” she says, unable to help herself. 

His mouth is a thin firm line as he looks at her, still thinking his unreachable thoughts.

“Arthur Miller and Marilyn, that awful marriage because he was so fucken delusional and disappointed about her. And DiMaggio was the same before him. Only DiMaggio was an insecure jealous fuckwit, and Miller was -- I don’t know -- cruel and awful because he could be, because he had built her up into this ideal woman she wasn’t, this sexy damsel he could save from evil Hollywood like some intellectual white knight instead of the real adult woman with ambition that she was. He was **_embarrassed_** by her when he could have been --”

“I wouldn’t do that to you.”

Startled by this directness, she focuses on him. 

“I don’t have any fucken delusions about you,” he says with such ferocity she splutters into a nervous laugh. “I don’t -- I’m sorry, I don’t. It’s like you said that night at the Old Fitz, you know. I know what you’re like, you know what I’m like. So you’re not likely to disappoint me. I already know how mad you are.”

“Oh! Like you’re --”

He captures her hands in his, forcing her to pay attention to his very serious eyes. “The point is -- the fucken point is we don’t have to buy into that bullshit about healing and saving, we could just be two grown up consenting adults who -- who want to be with each other. It doesn’t have to follow the goddamned blueprint for het relationships, it doesn’t have to repeat all the same stupid mistakes. Doesn’t have to be that way.”

Amused, she smiles at him. “We’re going to topple a few millennia of cultural conditioning in one go, are we?”

“Why not?” He grins. 

“This is amazingly optimistic of you,” she points out, curious. “With your family history and all your cynicism until now, why are you so sure all of a sudden?”

He shrugs. “There are other couples to draw on. It’s been done before, hasn’t it? We can’t be the first fucken couple to be goddamned equals. What about Blake and his wife?”

“Whose name you can’t remember because guess why,” she says gently.

He gets it, his mouth twisting ruefully. “Yeah, but it’s not her fault I’m thick. She knew her name. And that was a good marriage, wasn’t it?”

“Entirely in service of his career. Never mind what talents and dreams she might have had for herself.”

He pauses. “Okay, good point. Never mind them, then. Precedent or not, we can fucken make it our own.”

“Ooh, big talk,” she murmurs. 

He snorts, twisting around to reach for the remote. When he presses play, they scoot back into their tangled viewing positions, still half naked. 

“Anyway,” he says quietly, his head bent as he picks up her hand and holds it between both of his. “All the cultural baggage aside, it may just be … worth the effort.”

She closes her eyes, realising the courage it’s taken for him to say this in light of all her resistance. And as he waits for a response, she presses her lips against his temple. “Yeah. Maybe.”

It’s as close to a declaration of love as she’s going to get at this point. And maybe it won’t be enough for him, maybe he’ll get tired of waiting for the magic words.

The movie provokes a very enjoyable discussion of Robert Mitchum and how totally brilliant Night Of The Hunter is. “I’m so glad you’re such a weirdo,” she says impulsively.

His eyes sparkle. “Then my taste in film isn’t so terrible.”

She considers this for a playful moment. “Redeemable, let’s say.”

He laughs loud and calls her a Sydney snob which starts a whole other argument.

And it occurs to her he doesn’t say those words either.

_____________

 

She goes on the pill as soon as she can. But they don’t fuck for a very long time. There’s making out on the couch, hungry kisses and groping in steel mirrored lifts and restaurant corners. One night back at the club, she pulls him into the ladies, and they squeeze, laughing breathlessly, into a cubicle where she blows him until he comes with a muffled shout, hot and wet down her throat. “Oh fuck,” he groans afterwards, pulling her upright so he can taste his own come in her mouth. 

It takes her a while to realise he’s nervous about touching her cunt now, much less fuck her there. After some dithering and half-hearted attempts to get advice from her female friends, she decides it’s best if she just talks to him.

“What,” he explodes. “What! No! Jesus! Fuck! Are you fucken kidding me? I thought -- I didn’t want to -- oh my god.” He rubs a hand over his face and starts to explain with intense deliberation. “No, jesus fucken christ. I have not developed a horror of your cunt. I am actually quite intensely fond of your very pretty very juicy --”

“Oh my god!” She pushes at him, blushing so hard and not wanting him to stop. “Shut up, my god. I didn’t mean -- stop talking.”

“Really?” He advances on her, glinting blue eyes and wicked curving mouth. “Stop using such foul words? Maybe I should?” He tips her back onto the bed, pushes her skirt up, and goes down on her with such thoroughness she loses her mind for a good long while, moaning and crying out and coming and coming on his tongue, on his lovely fiendish face. 

“I was waiting,” he hauls himself up to tell her with great emphasis, “for you. I did not want to fucken push you when you weren’t ready. You **_idiot_**.”

She’s so happy she can’t bring herself to argue.

But over the next few weeks, she keeps returning to the thought that he hasn’t said the thing either. Maybe he’s waiting for her in that as well. 

But then does it really need to be said? He’s shown her in so many ways that he does care deeply about her, not just the sex and the passionate arguments but all the myriad small and big actions. Cooking her favourite dishes, learning to cook the ones he doesn’t know, the books, more damned playlists, tickets to plays and gigs. Wearing her bracelet, letting her sleep in peace and quiet while he potters around the place at the crack of dawn. He shows her in a thousand little ways, and she hopes it’s obvious in all the things she does for him.

Not just the cleaning of his loft which really she does for her own peace of mind. Not buying him clothes that flatter his colouring and build, listening to his awful music, organising him tickets to awful gigs and even going with him. The other things like surprising him with history books and invites to author talks, helping him with his writing, tracking down that biography he’s been hunting for a while. Waking up early to go to the fish market with him because he’s decided they’re going to have this particular type of prawn today. Finding prints of his favourite artworks and the more obscure works of artists he loves. Little sketches she does of his profile and the shape of his back as he sleeps, which he assures her is totally not creepy and very sweet indeed. She’s not sure she believes him on that. 

“Um,” she says one morning lying in his bed. “Don’t make the word fanaa, okay?”

“Eh?” He swings around from his computer, his hair standing on end, cigarette dangling from his lip. “What’d you say?”

“The neon cursive,” she reminds him. “Don’t make it fanaa, okay? I don’t want that -- I mean, it’s a great word and I love the movie and all but I --”

“Oh! No, no!” He beams at her. “No, I remember. All good, I got it. Don’t worry.”

He returns to the computer, and she’s dozing against the pillows that smell like both of them, listening to the sound of him typing, mumbling under his breath as he clicks the mouse. He’s probably scattering ash all over the keyboard.

“Catherine Sophia,” he announces suddenly. “Catherine Sophia Blake, née Boucher. Boucher?” he tries the French pronunciation. “Boucher, probably Boucher, the English way.”

“Well done,” she murmurs, eyes closed. “Now tell me about Godwin and Wollstonecraft, and their radical fierce love.”

_____________

 

For such a sprawling city and such a cliquey scene, it’s inevitable that they run into ex-lovers at the occasional gig or industry event. She notices that the women he’s been with tend to still regard him with a certain softness in their eyes. When she mentions this to him, he clearly can’t decide whether to be bashful or cocky about it. As she laughs and rolls her eyes, he exclaims, “Please! Like I haven’t seen the way the fuckers look at you from the stage. Your bloody harem of musos!”

“What? That’s got nothing to do with me,” she protests with delight. “I can’t help that musicians like to fixate on their heartbreak for their songs and shit!”

He stares at her with dawning realisation. “Holy fuck, are there songs about you? There are, aren’t there? Tell me! Show me!”

She laughs, perfectly wicked. “I have absolutely no idea.”

“Liar,” he mutters, and spends the next few days scrutinising the work of her exes.

At a backyard barbecue thronged with literati and the entertainment cliques, she’s sitting on his lap, his arm around her waist, as they have a very animated sardonic conversation about Tarkovsky with a couple of film reviewers. And beyond them, she recognises a familiar girl with dark hair and very red lipstick in a pretty vintage dress.

Of course, her ex is in a relationship, this one thin and blonde and a little overawed by the company. They exchange pleasantries, catch up on career developments and where each one is living now. He comes up to them in the middle of this, handing her a drink, and curves his arm around her waist. His smile is very smooth, eyes sharp blue.

Her ex isn’t very nice to him. There’s a distinct coldness, and the conversation ends soon after. As the two women walk away over the grass, he takes a drag off his smoke, his voice ironic. “Was it my cologne?”

She turns, linking her arm with his. “No, actually I think it was your cock.”

He jerks, startled and grinning already. “Really?” Then his expression changes, narrows on her with bewilderment. “Wait, what? She knew -- you were with other guys before her -- what the fuck?”

“Yup. But, you know, some people -- that,” she says with a brittle smile, “is what we call biphobia. And it comes from all fucken sides.”

His mouth twists and he hugs her with one arm, kissing her hair as they rejoin their friends.

Then one evening she comes home to find him hovering with great excitement by the front door. “It’s here, it’s here, come look!”

Sometimes he really is like a puppy. A tall beautiful rumpled puppy with bright eyes, good cheekbones and a sinful mouth. Caught by his enthusiasm, she slips off her satchel and allows him to guide her by the shoulders into the living room.

The neon cursive text is flame orange red, so very Arian of him. The font is fine and pretty, just curly enough to be interesting and not so sloppy or ornate to be unreadable. She’s aware that he’s watching her now with barely concealed anxiety, vibrating with that quiet intensity.

“What do you think?”

The sign says Radical Fierce Love.

“I love it,” she says, her throat thick with emotion, and kisses him with her hands on his face, honest and speaking. He responds with the same sincerity, his fingers tightening on her waist, his chin tilting as they kiss deeper and deeper, her arms sliding around his neck.

Some things don’t need to be said to be understood.

_______________

 

They have slow intense sex that evening, breathless and almost painfully good. It’s the first time in months he’s let her put his cock into her cunt. All this while, he’s been so good at distracting her in a multitude of ways. But now he presses his forehead against hers, glimmers of blue through his lashes, his mouth catching hers soft and wet, little throaty moans as he trembles a little and fucks her deep and slow. Barely a breath between them, her arms hooked under his, hands on his shoulderblades, she feels all tangled up in him and it’s terrifying and glorious because he’s right there in the fear with her.

Vulnerable, she thinks with a weird awful clarity.

And that’s okay. That’s beautiful.

Everything seems to move towards a new kind of normal. Their mutual friend has a little baby boy, and they experience at uncomfortable proximity the absolute hell of new parenthood. After a particularly stressful afternoon visit, he says to her, “We are totally completely fucken protected, right? I mean, I can go back on the fucken condoms, I don’t mind!”

She laughs quietly. “Yes. We are.”

Their careers kick into another gear, hers shifting focus with the changing technology and the internet, his with a change in perception, the industry seeing different depths in him. It’s endlessly amusing to him how the happier he is privately, the darker he is professionally. But the hurdles and setbacks continue, that glint of success and fully realised potential just out of reach.

Then one night he turns up at her place, slightly drunk and very needy. Hair a mess, he’s sweaty in his crumpled dark blue suit, glittering eyes as he casts his sunnies aside, pulls his tie free and advances on her. It’s like he’s reverted right back to the guy she saw in the heat and stink of the nightclub so long ago. 

Only this time she kisses him right back, gripping his chin hard because he’s hers and she has him completely. One hand gripping the slats of the headboard, the other braced beside her shoulder, the bed slams against the wall as he slams into her, and she gasps and digs her nails into his back getting all slippery with sweat. Hot blue eyes, his skewed red mouth, those breathy anguished moans, an endless hammering fuck, he’s fleeing something and she’s catching him with everything she has, holding onto him with this roaring need to keep him safe.

Afterwards, she holds his face, feeling their stampeding hearts slow down. “What the hell happened? What’s wrong?”

He rolls off her, breathless wet, and puts a hand over his eyes. “I lost the fucken job. That fucken -- that shitcunt scheming fucktard --”

She’s gotten so used to the eye-wateringly creative way he swears she barely blinks this time. 

“Ohhh.” The rival who’s getting a little too good at stealing opportunities away from him.

She turns his face to her. “Your day will come,” she tells him fiercely.

His smile is a little sad. “Yeah, when? Not exactly getting younger.”

“Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter how old you are when it happens. And I don’t know when. But you’re going to hang in there and keep working and keep getting better, keep evolving at your craft. And one day you are gunna fucken eclipse him, and that day will be fucken glorious!”

His eyes soften blue grey on her. “Yeah? You promise?”

“I promise.”

And she’s right.

It takes several more years, a relocation, terrible homesickness and struggles of adjustment, a few awful breakups and teary reconciliations. Her career takes off before his, launches her onto the international scene. It throws a certain reflected spotlight on him, and he manages it with enough grace and humour. She has to carefully consider his ego when her expanding network of influence makes it possible to direct opportunities his way. Sometimes that works, sometimes he explodes in frustration at her. They fight and scream at each other, slam doors, and come back all apologies and remorse.

And eventually it all pays off. His career flourishes, he finally gets the international recognition he deserves. The reviews, the steady increase in quality offers, the awards. It’s a sweet, sweet time. And he’s right, they do manage it as total equals.

He wants them to be a power couple, she tells him they’re both way too dorky to manage that. Power nerd couple, maybe, quirky and classy and fun.

And eventually when the time is right, they go off the contraception. She tells him they’ll try the biological way first, and if it doesn’t work, they’ll look at adoption. He agrees. They come back home because the pregnancy is high-risk, but by then they can afford extremely good medical care. He quits smoking out of sheer worry, the logic of which completely escapes her. Their first daughter arrives premature via caesarean. A couple of years later, the second girl arrives in exactly the same fashion. Both grow into healthy very wilful children. Neither care for their parents’ taste in literature, both are passionate about rescue animals.

The house basically turns into a menagerie. A very noisy, smelly chaotic house of books and music and animals, and the occasional bird flying past the flicker of orange red neon.

“See?” he taunts her. “You were wrong about relationships that start in nightclubs. Weren’t you?”

She eyes him, wondering whether it’s too late to push him off the bed and claim misadventure. He chortles, bending an arm under his head, a mischievous elegant man with narrow creased face and tufting silver hair.

“Yes,” she admits with contentment. “I was wrong.”

Prove me wrong, fuckboy, turn into my prince.

Because he did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So vell1chor and I were discussing that first pic and I said, “Kings Cross night club, bleary eyed, yelling philosophy at people, getting into fights on sidewalks, passing out unconscious in gutters, licking men's faces, staggering out with booby women” and Em said “slightly drunk, slightly high, slightly fucked out Mendo emerging from a random Melbourne club, cigarette precariously dangling from that crooked weird mouth, hair a mess....” So I combined the two. 
> 
> _Don’t underestimate me, boy, I’ll make you sorry you were born_ is from _Don’t Call Me Baby_ by Madison Avenue, which I never realised was so fiercely wonderfully feminist. Yes, I'm an old, obvs.
> 
> Yep, in case the stairwell sex scene seemed familiar, it's very much inspired by a gifset posted at [lackinprivacy](https://lackinprivacy.tumblr.com/) of the scene from **Unfaithful**. I get so much valuable visual inspiration from that excellent blog, bless and thank you.
> 
> The second half of the fic is basically my version of **Love My Way** cos yeah, Sydney and I had to. That show, you guys.
> 
> The "there's no alarm bell" line is inspired by one of my favourite most powerful scenes in **UnReal**. Quinn, that goddess.
> 
> Radical Fierce Love is actually a tagline from the most wonderful Australasian feminist cabaret act Hot Brown Honey. I love that phrase so much, especially in its original context rather how I’ve configured it here.
> 
> Also, if you can pick the line from **The Philadelphia Story** that he quotes without her realising, you may be my new favourite person.  <3  
> 


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